Vacillating over a possible presidential run, first for the 1988 election and again in 1992, New York governor Mario Cuomo elevated his indecision to existential drama—“Hamlet on the Hudson” he was called while he kept everyone hanging on, waiting for him to declare yes or no as he wrestled with maybe. Although Cuomo was clearly a man who savored the rich mahogany of his voice as he pondered aloud, his equivocation seemed genuine, fretful—so testified the weary bags under his eyes. He wasn’t just playing hard to get, stringing us along. In recent years, however, we’ve had a boardwalk parade of notables giving us the big tease, basking in the media attention even a brief, flyaway, floppo candidacy brings. (Forbes editor in chief and flat-tax fiend Steve Forbes will forever have “former presidential contender” stapled into his introductions.) They dangle themselves before us, fueled by a strange mixture of room-filling ego and wanting to be wanted, trying to get us so crazed that we’re signing ballot petitions and tucking crisp donations into their beaded thongs.

The elaborate foreplay of contemplating a run for high office gives pundits, cable-TV hosts, and even conceited bloggers (such as neoliberal, knee-jerk counter-intuitivist Mickey Kaus, eyeing Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat from California) the opportunity to preen their opinions even more and practice the false humility of pretending to answer a clamor that is mostly in their heads. Lou Dobbs, the former CNN heavyweight host who frittered away a rock-solid image with intemperate flare-ups and kooky talk about immigrant-borne diseases and Obama’s birth certificate, claimed he was being wooed by prominent nobodies to consider the presidency, then dialed down such speculation. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews toyed with our affections, hinting at a Senate run in Pennsylvania against Arlen Specter, though that fancy seems to have whiffed into smoke. The post–Eliot Spitzer, post–Hillary Clinton disarray in New York State encouraged a spate of alpha males to lace up their racing shoes for a possible sprint at the U.S. Senate seat held by Kirsten Gillibrand, whose freshman status and cream-puff cheeks give the impression of a soft target there for the taking. Up popped Harold Ford, a smooth operator whose knowledge of his adopted state seemed scanty but who knew the best places in town for power breakfasts and manicures. Although Ford served in Congress for his home state of Tennessee and lost a Senate bid after a racy, racist smear ad hinted he was a “playa” (“Call me,” winked a saucy blonde), he is probably more familiar to New Yorkers as a frequent guest on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and similar Socratic forums where his sensible, centrist moderation is catnip. Political pietists worship at the sacrificial altar of bipartisanship, prizing those who “reach across the aisle” even if no hand is reaching back. For many Democrats, however, “centrist” is a euphemism for sellout (see Joe Lieberman, consider his trespasses), and Ford’s slinky facility for slipping into and out of positions (opposition to gay marriage, for instance) made him too obvious a quick-change artist. He eventually heeded the roar of indifference from the public and scratched himself from contention, while insisting he could have beaten Gillibrand.

At least Ford had held elected office and withstood the Proust­ian tedium of the legislative process, unlike the other swelled heads who have surfaced. It isn’t that representative democracy couldn’t do with outside transfusions from political virgins. When Gore Vidal competed for Congress in 1960 and William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer took turns running for mayor of New York (in 1965 and 1969, respectively), they were genuine provocateurs with brains to burn, temperamentally iconoclastic and anti-Establishment. Now it’s mostly establishmentarians—Beltway insiders, Wall Street groupies, media elitists, even former C.E.O.’s (such as HP’s Carly Fiorina and eBay’s Meg Whitman)—who are trying to dress themselves as outsiders, rebels, instruments of change. The low rumbles of the Tea Party movement have encouraged the dilettanti on the higher floors to try their hors-d’oeuvre-spearing hands at populism. It takes self-infatuation of a unique rosy hue to make a peripatetic media presence such as Mort Zuckerman—real-estate mogul, owner-publisher of the New York Daily News and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report, former owner of The Atlantic, and frequent panelist on The McLaughlin Group and Charlie Rose—think that New Yorkers are hankering for another bossy billionaire to lord over their interests. Even more charisma-challenged than his friend and apparent role model, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, Zuckerman was less likely to be able to pull off the political-transvestite trick of catering to the Democratic majority while masquerading as a Republican independent in order to knock off a real Democrat, Gillibrand. Egging him on, the New York Post—the *Daily News’*s tabloid rival—published a Bizarro World editorial lauding Zuckerman as an international Übermensch and encouraging his candidacy, as if setting him up for the big kill. It was an editorial shrewdly crafted to appeal to the vanity of a public figure who prides himself on transcending political labels. Unfortunately, Zuckerman didn’t swallow the bait. Arousing the press into a mad frenzy of anticipation, he, like Ford, removed himself from the starting gate.

No such ideological shape-shifting would be required of CNBC host Larry Kudlow, a Republican cockatoo who invokes Ronald Reagan’s name as if it were the cure for erectile dysfunction. He wears his partisan labels proudly, as bumper stickers of honor. Kudlow is tracking bigger game than Mega Mort was, contemplating a crusade to unseat New York’s powerful senior senator (and Gillibrand’s sponsor), Chuck Schumer. “I do believe that retiring Senator Schumer would be a noble cause,” Kudlow has intoned, envisioning the battlefield. The battlefield would be hopping, that’s for sure. A hawkish, supply-side free-marketeer who dresses in banker pinstripes and spouts brain-dead slogans (reducing energy policy to “Drill, drill, drill!”), Kudlow has a hefty load of freaky-deaky baggage that reporters and bloggers are just dying to rummage through again. The Web site Gawker has already posted a nostalgic flashback about Kudlow’s drug enthrallment in the 1980s and 90s pithily titled “Larry Kudlow, Cokehead.” As a New York State voter, I am unconcerned about Kudlow’s past inhalations. I accept his sobriety and don’t picture him nodding out at his Senate desk with a mime-white faceful of blow, like Tony Montana taking some “me time” in Scarface. What I, Catholic-raised, do find worrisome is the fact that Kudlow is a Catholic convert, since conversion to Catholicism can be the sign of a scoundrel prone to spreading a little extra sanctimony on his waffles. (See Newt Gin­grich, the late Robert Novak, and just about everybody associated with
the old National Review.) Catholic converts can talk a good game of redemption and devotion while pushing their power politics at the same mean velocity, conveniently ignoring the strictures of their adopted church against torture, capital punishment, and war waging. In 2002, years after his conversion, Kudlow advocated the invasion of Iraq because it would jack up the Dow (“The shock therapy of decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple-thousand points”), and for that alone he should be damned, in this world if not the next.

Emerging from the Iraq debacle with his gall intact is Dan Senor, the former mouthpiece for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, yet another Fox News contributor in Roger Ailes’s kangaroo pouch, and the husband of CNN anchor Campbell Brown. He’s rumored to be meeting with money people and sending out feelers regarding his own pursuit of Gillibrand’s Senate seat. On TV, Senor wields the anvil certainty that one associates with the high noon of neoconservatism, a quality that most New York voters are unlikely to find fetching, but the political world is full of improbable scenarios that came to pass, and Senor has reportedly been polling voters to determine whether his Iraq track rec­ord renders him radioactive. Such test polling is part of the ritual of the political tease, followed by “thoughtful” op-eds in the major papers, talk-show appearances in which you agilely deflect questions about your future plans with a courtesan’s painted fan, and the now requisite “listening tour,” which involves mingling with regular folks at greasy spoons where reporters and photographers outnumber the customers five to one. When the porn queen Stormy Daniels—the star of such classics as Operation Desert Stormy—proposed to deprive David Vitter of re-election to the Senate from Louisiana (a noble quest, given Vitter’s vile backwardness on women’s issues), she embarked on a listening tour; she listened while everyone stared at her shorefront property. Oh well, at least in this case the voters are being teased by a professional, one capable of wrapping herself around a stripper pole like a pretzel. That’s still a more dignified position than some of the ones these male temptresses have taken.